The morning after we return from Rian’s palace, Erik doesn’t wake at sunrise, which takes me by surprise. Now that we have animals, there are chores to be done, so I occupy myself with feeding them and cleaning out the pens and stalls, then sweeping the small barn free of cobwebs. Once the animals are taken care of, Erik is still sleeping, so I set a hay bale against the wall of the barn and practice with a new dagger the way he showed me. I remember the way Rian grabbed my arm, and I swing hard each time, trying to keep my aim straight, my movement swift.
By the time I’m done, my shoulder aches, so I slip back into the house to start sorting through everything Rian provided, using one of the spare bedrooms to organize my apothecary supplies. I lay out bottles and instruments and my books and any herbs I have from the ship, then grind and pour and measure anything that might be useful when we head into town tomorrow. Within a few hours, I have a rather comprehensive kit assembled, but now it’s midday and there’s still been no sign of Erik.
I remember him wincing in the wagon last night and wonder if his wound was worse than he was telling me.
Men.Worry might be twisting in my gut, but I scowl anyway. I wash up from my work, then peek into his sleeping quarters, where he’s snoring in the sunlight.
Well, at least I know he’s still breathing.
I don’t want to disturb him, but he hasn’t slept this late since we arrived, and it doesn’t seem typical. We were gone quite a long time yesterday, and I creep into the room, studying him, trying to determine if his coloring looks off, or whether his skin looks clammy.
No and no.
But still. He could have developed an infection. A fever could make him sleep like this. He’s shirtless, but his blankets cover his waist, so I can’t tell if his wound has started seeping or if the bandages are still in place. I move closer, wondering if I can touch him without waking him.
Someone bangs at the front door to the house, and I jump and give a little yip—but that’s nothing compared to the way Erik startles, throwing blankets aside and pulling a dagger from under his pillow.
“Erik!” I cry, stumbling back. “It’s just me!”
He blinks at me, freezing in place.
Someone pounds at the door again, but it’s abruptly cut off.
Erik straightens. “Then who’s that?”
A woman’s muffled voice is audible from outside. “Ellmo!” she’s saying sharply. “Stop pounding on the door like that. They could be out on the water.”
The boy’s little voice comes back at once. “Do you think we could take the honey if they’re not here?”
“We’re here!” I yell. “I’ll be right out.”
Erik gives me a withering glance, then sighs. “Allow me a few minutes to get dressed, Miss Tessa.” But then he frowns. “Why were you in here?”
I’m already by the door to his quarters, and I can feel heat in my cheeks. “I was worried about you. It’s late.”
He looks at the sunlight streaming through the window and grimaces. “Forgive me. The animals need to be fed—”
“I took care of it. You needed the sleep. I was worried you had a fever.”
He shakes his head. “I’m all right. Just tired.”
Ellmo shouts, “Are you sure you’re in there, Miss Tessa?” before Olive hushes him.
Erik glares, but he rubs a hand over his face. “I’ll be out in a moment. Tell that little demon I’ll soak him in honey if he bangs on the door like that again.”
“I’m pretty sure you’ll tell him yourself.”
When I get to the door, I’m surprised to find Olive with a basket, and Ellmo peering in the windows. I invite them both inside.
“You don’t need to peek,” I tell him. “You were already inside last night.”
“But it was dark!” he says. “I didn’t even get the toys you promised.”
“They’re in one of the bedrooms. You can go look. But don’t bother Erik. He’s getting dressed, and he was ready to soak you in honey for waking him up.”
He scampers off. It looks like Olive has a new bandage on her arm, so I say, “Was your wound bothering you?”
“Not at all. I checked it this morning and wanted to put a fresh bandage over it.” She gives me a smile, then sets the basket on the table in the kitchen and begins unwrapping. “I know you got plenty of food from our king”—that disdainful tone again—“but I needed to make bread today, so I made an extra two loaves for you.” Her cheeks turn a little pink. “A bit of an apology for shooting at you yesterday.”
“You didn’t have to do that! You already helped us unload.”
“Well.” She smiles. “I did.” She hesitates. “I was also going to ask if you still planned to take the wagon back into the city.”
I glance at the hallway. “Erik and I were going to go back to see about getting a goat,” I say. “But I don’t know if he feels rested enough for that.”
I tried not to let any worry into my voice, but she frowns anyway. “Is he unwell?”
“He was injured on the journey here. He’s been trying to hide it, but I know it pains him.”
Olive nods. “I thought he was moving stiffly last night.” Her voice drops. “A bad injury? You sound worried.”
Her brown eyes stare into mine, and I study her across the table. We’ve only just met her, and despite how things turned out, she was shooting at us in the woods. But I keep thinking about the way she warned me about Rian. The way she keeps saying our king.
I don’t know how much Erik would want me to say, but I sense that any admission of his injury would make him unhappy.
“It could have been a lot worse,” I finally say, and I can read in her eyes that she knows I’m hedging. Between us, the loaves have been unwrapped, and they smell heavenly. “I’ll get a knife. I’m sure he’ll be hungry.”
Ellmo’s little voice comes from the next room. “I know I’m hungry, Mama!”
I laugh under my breath. “So we’re feeding both the boys.”
“We can all eat if you like,” says Olive. She unwraps the rest of the cloth and pulls out a roll of cheese. “I brought cheese, too.”
While I start to slice the loaves, she looks around the small kitchen, and her eyes light up a little. “Do you have matches for the stove? We could toast the bread.” Her eyebrows go up. “And are those fresh tomatoes? Our king certainly does want your favor.”
I find the small box of matches and light the stove, setting a cast-iron pan above the flame. “Well, he’s not getting it.”
She smiles. “I like you.”
I like her, too. She has an easy manner that’s hard to ignore.
Or maybe I just like that Rian seems to irritate her as much as he irritates me.
Erik’s voice rumbles from the hallway. “That puzzle is far too hard for a five-year-old.”
“I’m seven!” Ellmo cries.
Olive rolls her eyes and reaches for the small jar of lard on the counter. “Don’t hold it against me, but I haven’t decided about your husband yet.”
I nearly knock the pan right off the stove. “My what?”
She looks at me in surprise. “Oh. I’m sorry. I assumed you were married.”
“No! We’re—we’re—”
I have no idea how to finish that. Friends would be true, but still feels awkward.
Olive gives me a look. “But you’re a couple, yes? You’re sharing a house.” She raises an eyebrow. “It sounded like you were in the bedroom together.”
My cheeks surge with heat. “What? No! I—it’s—”
Erik chooses that moment to walk into the kitchen in nothing but his trousers, with his tunic in one hand. He must have shaved, because his face is a little damp, a few droplets still clinging to his chest. We’ve been sharing the house, and I’ve changed his bandage several times now, so it’s not like I haven’t caught a glimpse of him without a shirt, but I’m suddenly aware of . . . of what this looks like. Not to mention the cords of muscle down his arms. The sheer breadth of his shoulders.
“Why are you both staring at me?” he says.
I jerk my eyes away and turn back toward the stove—but Olive jerks her gaze in the opposite direction and nearly walks right into me with the knife in her hand. I all but fall into the stove. The pan rattles heavily.
Erik clears his throat. “As flattering as this is, please don’t kill yourselves because I walked in here without a shirt on. Miss Tessa, I do think the poultice needs changing.”
That steals any heat from my cheeks, and I look back at him. The bandage is stained, like his wound seeped during the night. The skin surrounding the bandage has reddened. My earlier concern returns.
Olive bumps my shoulder. “Go see to your not-husband,” she murmurs, and I realize her cheeks are still pink. “I’ll make lunch.”
“He’s not my anything!” I whisper back. “He calls me Miss Tessa!”
“Oh, I thought that was a Kandalan thing. I found it endearing.”
Erik says, “You two know I can hear you, right?”
I heave a sigh. “I’ll get my supplies.” I cut a glance at Erik. “But he’s more like an annoying big brother than anything else.”
While she cooks, I have Erik sit in one of the chairs. When I pull the bandage free, he hisses, as it brings blood and a thin layer of pus with it. The surrounding skin is swollen and inflamed.
He must read my face before I can say anything. “Not good?”
I put a hand against his forehead. I thought his face was damp from shaving, but now that I’m sitting this close to him, I wonder if he’s sweating—but it’s also a warm day. “I’m worried it’s infected. Do you feel like you have a fever?”
“No.”
I give him a look, but he looks right back at me, adding flatly, “I can be more annoying about it if I need to be.”
“Look,” I say. “Olive thought you were my husband.”
“I’m ten years older than you!” he exclaims.
The pan on the stove sizzles as Olive adds some buttered bread. “It’s not that dramatic a difference. My father and mother were fifteen years apart.”
I’m not really listening to them. I’m peering at his abdomen again. The stab wound isn’t healing well at all. Puncture wounds are always so tricky. I remember tracing Corrick’s scars in the lantern-lit darkness on the ship, hearing him tell me about the smugglers who’d attacked him. He had a stab wound similar to this, too.
I thought that one was going to do me in, he said. Took ages to heal.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?”
Erik’s voice calls me back, and I blink, then look up. He’s not teasing me anymore, and his eyes hold mine.
“It’s not great,” I say. “Spending half the day walking and then unloading a wagon probably didn’t help.” I chew at my lip, thinking of the way he was pulling dusty tarps off the rowboats, too. I’m better with elixirs and creams and poultices. Easing pain. Providing remedies for fevers and coughs. I don’t have much experience with long-term injuries like this, and I’m going to have to go back through my books to see what my father’s old notes say. I’m worried we might need to cut the infection away, but I don’t know if it’s gone that far yet.
“I can make another poultice, but if I can trust you to lie down for a while”—I fix him with a glare—“I think you should leave it to the air and let the infection dry out a bit. I’m worried it’s beginning to spread.”
“Do you have spirits?” Olive says, adding cheese to the bread. “Whiskey? Anything stronger? It might be better to cut out the infection and rinse it with that first.”
Erik stares at her. “And then what? Set myself on fire?”
Ellmo appears in the doorway, and he gasps, but not with horror. “Can I watch?”
Olive doesn’t turn away from the stove. “It’s what the surgeons had to do after the war.” She pauses. “There were a lot of wounds like that.”
Erik meets my eyes, and he looks like he’s expecting me to find her suggestion insane—but when I obviously don’t, he swallows.
“What do you think?” he says to me, his voice low.
“I think you’re on the edge of infection spreading, if it hasn’t already.” I hesitate. “I don’t know what kind of healers they have left here. You saw the citadel. If the infection spreads quickly, you could be dead in days.”
He runs a hand across his face and swears. “Well, damn, Miss Tessa.”
Ellmo lights up and repeats it immediately. Erik looks like he’s going to growl at the boy, but Olive turns from the stove.
“Ellmo,” she says. “I need exactly one hundred white shells from the beach to clean the pan after lunch. If you bring me too many, I’ll make you go fetch them again. Go now, or your food will be cold.”
He scurries out so quickly that the door slams behind him. Olive takes the pan off the heat, then turns to us. “He’ll be gone for a while. He gets a bit mixed up once he gets past the sixties.”
“You need shells to clean the pan?” I say.
“No, but he needed a task.” She dries her hands on a towel, then busies herself with arranging the food on some plates.
Erik is still looking at me. “Have you done it?” he says.
I hesitate, then bite my lip. “No?”
His eyes just about bug out of his head, so I rush on, “I’m an apothecary, not a surgeon! I watched my father do it a few times in the Wilds, though. And I’ve stitched up plenty of wounds. I can be quick.”
“And I can help,” says Olive. “I’ve watched a lot more than a few times.”
He swears again. “Fine. There’s plenty of liquor in the chests from the ship. Get two bottles.”
“Two?”
“Yeah,” he says roughly. “One is for me.”
Despite my promise, I’m not quick.
The stab wound is far deeper than I thought, and it seems I cut pus and inflamed skin away forever. In the beginning, Erik is stoic and nearly silent, but as time wears on, he’s cursing Rian and his crew, cursing Prince Corrick, cursing me and Olive—especially every time I flush the wound with alcohol. He sweats through his clothes twice over, and a few times I’ve worried we should tie him down, but Olive always draws him back, wiping away sweat or telling him a story or being sharp when he needs a distraction from the pain. She also pours a good dose of liquor down his throat when he needs it. When Ellmo returned with a hundred shells, Olive told him to take his lunch to “keep watch” by the docks.
She’s quick thinking and kind, despite her brusqueness, and I really like her. Working with her is as easy as working with Karri, and it’s odd that I only met her a day ago. I feel as though I’ve known her for far longer.
Eventually, Erik’s blood runs bright red, and there’s no sign of pus or mottled skin. His eyes have gone heavy-lidded, and Olive drags a cloth across his forehead.
Erik shakes his head. “No . . . no more,” he says, and his words slur together. “No more, Misssss Tesssssa.”
“No more,” I agree, packing clean muslin around the wound and binding it in place. “You can rest now.”
“It looks much better,” Olive says to me quietly. “You did a good job.”
“I’m glad you were here,” I say, then hesitate. “I really don’t think he could’ve gone much longer.”
“Probably not. But he’ll be no good for the rest of the day.” Olive pats him on the cheek and begins to move away. “Be a good soldier and don’t wet the bed.”
“I’m not a soldier.” He reaches out and catches her hand loosely. “Why don’t you be a good nurse and stay awhile?”
Olive giggles and we exchange a glance. “Well now,” she says. “I suppose he’s not your husband.”
“I’m not anyone’s husband,” he slurs, sounding aggrieved. He doesn’t let go of her hand. “But you’re very pretty. Maybe one day I could be your—”
“That’s enough, Erik,” I say, taking hold of his hand and pulling him free. “You can say anything you want when you’ve got your wits about you.” I set his hand back on the bed, and his eyes flicker closed.
But just as I’m about to shut the door, his voice calls me back. “Stay close, Miss Tessa.”
I pause with my hand on the frame. “I will.”
“I promised him I would keep you safe, too. I have to keep one promise.”
For a breath of time, I can’t move. I swallow past the tightness in my throat. “You will,” I say. “I’ll be right here.”
Back in the kitchen, Olive unwraps the cheese sandwiches, which are still a bit warm, while I rinse my hands in the basin. Then she lights a fire under the kettle and finds the small sack of coffee that Rian gave me yesterday. Again, there’s a weird comfort to her presence. We’re both quiet, and I know she heard what he said. Despite what we just did, and despite the ease we had in working together, I don’t know her very well at all, and I don’t know how much to say about it.
The silence is too much to bear, though, especially while I’m rinsing Erik’s blood and sweat off my skin. “Thank you,” I say. “I really don’t think I would’ve been able to do that alone.”
“You don’t have to thank me.” She lifts her bandaged arm. “I owed you.”
“That was nowhere near the same.”
“Still. I didn’t mind.” She hesitates. “He seems like a decent man.”
It’s the first time she hasn’t groused about him riling Ellmo, so I smile. “He is. He’s one of the king’s personal guards. Back in Kandala.”
“Maybe that’s why I thought he was your husband. He’s very protective.”
The end of that sentence feels like there’s more to be said, and I wait for her to say it . . . but she doesn’t. I stare at my food, and she stares at hers, and eventually the kettle whistles. Olive sets to making coffee, and I’m glad, because I’ve only seen Rian do it on the ship.
But while she does it, my throat tightens as I think of what Erik said.
I promised him I would keep you safe.
I don’t know if he meant Corrick or Harristan. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
Maybe it wasn’t even a real promise. Maybe it’s just one he made in his heart.
I have to press a hand over my own to ease the ache. It doesn’t help.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Olive says quietly. She pours powdered milk into the coffee and adds a twist of the honey that Ellmo envies, then slides a cup in front of me. “I know you just met me. But I know your guard isn’t the only one with a deep wound.”
The pain in my chest goes nowhere. I have to close my eyes. I don’t even know if I can speak.
Oh, Corrick.
Maybe she can sense my agony, because instead of waiting for me to answer, Olive keeps talking. “My husband died in the war,” she says. “Three years ago.”
That’s enough to startle my eyes open. “You had a husband?”
She nods and gives me half a smile. “Ellmo didn’t get here himself, you know.” The smile slips off her face, and she continues, “I didn’t want him to fight, but of course everyone had to fight. I begged Rian not to send Wyatt out on the water, and he swore it wasn’t his choice, but . . .” She shrugs. “Maybe he was telling the truth, but I doubt it. Wyatt was a strong sailor. A good leader. And Rian does what he has to do.” She runs a finger around the rim of her cup and shrugs. “He always has.”
I’m staring at her now. Remembering how she said she didn’t trust Rian either, how he might mean well—but he doesn’t care who gets hurt. “You’ve known him for a long time?”
“I’ve known him since he was born.” Her face twists. “Rian and I share a father.” She scowls and takes a sip of her coffee. “And a horrific uncle. Faithfulness and honor don’t seem to be qualities that run very clearly through the family tree.”
My hand is frozen on my own cup. I can’t stop staring. Corrick and I sat at dinner with the king while Rian talked about the battles for the throne in Ostriary, how their king had dozens of siblings and illegitimate children all squabbling over who should rule after the king’s death.
Olive runs a finger around her cup again. “I’m surprised Rian didn’t tell you.” She shrugs. “Then again, maybe he’s forgotten I’m out here. That wouldn’t surprise me either. He knows I’ve got nothing left to say to him.”
“You’re . . . you’re a princess,” I say.
She laughs a little. “Well. I suppose. Does it matter?”
“Rian told us everyone fought over the throne.”
“Not everyone.” She shrugs. “I didn’t want it. Wyatt was happy to help defend Fairde—and when Rian was trying to save people, I was happy to help patch them up, just like I helped you. But when he started grappling for power . . .” She grimaces again. “I didn’t like it. Everyone thinks he’s a good man. And in a lot of ways, he is. But sometimes he uses that trust. That belief. That loyalty. He hides behind it. And I don’t think many people see it.”
I swallow thickly. “I saw it,” I whisper. “Not at first—but eventually.”
She smiles, but it’s a sad smile. “That’s always how it is, with him.”
And maybe she’s struck the core of the reason I feel this level of kinship with Olive, even when I shouldn’t trust anyone at all. Maybe it’s the understanding that someone else was fooled by Rian, even though he doesn’t seem to be trying to fool anyone at all.
“I know,” she says. “I heard it in your voice when you told me why you weren’t in the palace at Tarrumor.” She pauses. “When you said there were . . . complications.”
My throat tightens again, and my eyes fill.
Complications.
Olive puts her hand over mine, and I blink, surprised to see that her eyes are full as well.
“You can tell me,” she says again. “I’ll listen.”
“Corrick wasn’t my husband,” I say, and my voice breaks. “But I loved him.” The tears spill over. “I loved him so much.”
She comes around to me and wraps me up in her arms. Corrick and Erik would probably be warning me away, telling me to be on the lookout for a trap. But there’s too much emotion in the air, and I can’t look at every single person with so much cynicism. I just can’t. Her arms tighten on my back, and I press my eyes into her shoulder, and I sob until I lose track of time.
At some point I run out of tears, and I lift my head. I feel wrung out.
On the counter beside me is a pile of grass and wildflowers, most of them with roots and dirt still clinging to them. I frown.
“From Ellmo,” says Olive. “He came in and saw you crying.”
My heart melts. “That is very sweet.”
“He has his moments.” She reaches for a kitchen cloth and blots at my face. “I’m sure you couldn’t do that to the drunken lout who’s probably going to need new bedding later. Do you feel better?”
I remember the way Erik seemed so uncomfortable with my tears in the rowboat. “I do, actually.”
“Good.” She hesitates. “Is it bad that I’m dying to hear about everything Rian did wrong?”
That makes me laugh through the last of my tears, and for the first time, my heart seems to settle, just the tiniest bit. I trust Erik, but this is a different kind of comfort, to share grief with someone who can understand it so acutely. “No. I’ll tell you everything.”
And I do.
